Pesticides blamed for clinical depression in farmers

Seven pesticides, including some that are very common, are triggering clinical depression among US farmers, a 20-year study released by the US National Institutes of Health has indicated.

The study by the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) found that farmers who used
organochlorines - one of two categories of the seven pesticides -
to eradicate insects, weeds, and fungi were up to 90 percent more
likely to have been diagnosed with depression. Farmers who
employed widely-used fumigants, the other category, were up to 80
percent more likely to suffer from depression. The study was
first published last month.

To investigate any connections between depression and pesticide
use, the NIH researchers interviewed about 84,000 farmers and
spouses of farmers beginning in the mid-1990s.

“There had been scattered reports in the literature that
pesticides were associated with depression,” Dr. Freya
Kamel, the lead researcher for the study, told Modern Farmer. “We wanted to do a
new study because we had more detailed data than most people have
access to.”

One common pesticide among the seven analyzed by NIH was
malathion, used by 67 percent of the farmers involved in the
study. Malathion is banned in Europe.

The researchers found that only 8 percent of farmers surveyed
said they has sought treatment for depression, which is below the
10 percent of Americans who have reached out for professional
help.

“We didn’t have to deal with overreporting [of depression]
because we weren’t seeing that,” Kamel told Modern Farmer.

Still, seeking treatment for depression is not the same as
actually suffering from it.

The study was not concerned with how the pesticides are affecting
farmers and their loved ones, but numerous studies have linked
pesticides use and damage to neurological and brain functions,
among other afflictions.

“I don’t think there’s any question that pesticides can
affect the functions of the brain,” Kamel recently toldEnvironmental Health News.

The seven chemicals “are created to kill,” Melanie
Forti, director of health and safety programs at the Association
of Farmworker Opportunity Programs, a farmer advocacy group,
told Vice.

“We don’t know exactly how much exposure is needed to harm
people, too, but we know that it’s an issue.”

A
2013 report by the Natural Resource Defense Council found
that the US Environmental Protection Agency’s process for
approving biocides is deeply-flawed and littered with loopholes.
Through its exhaustive study, the organization “determined
that the government has allowed the majority of pesticides onto
the market without a public and transparent process and in some
cases, without a full set of toxicity tests, using a loophole
called a conditional registration. In fact, as many as 65 percent
of more than 16,000 pesticides were first approved for the market
using this loophole.”

The NIH study does not recommend any public-policy solutions to
their damning findings. Others see the mounting evidence as a
call to move on stronger regulations that will protect human and
environmental health.

“Plenty of these studies have been done in the past, and
basically all of them come to the conclusion that exposure to
pesticides leads to neurological effects which in turn cause a
depression that can increase the likelihood of suicide,”
Forti told Vice. “We’re not a scientific program, so we
haven’t done any of our own studies, but we have years of
anecdotal information that support the same conclusion.”